


Songs From the Wasteland

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 06:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4008898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves? (we must turn towards each other)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of these before the comics came out. The comics reveal that Jo actually had his wives educated but I had head-canoned previously that he had not allowed them access to education since education is knowledge and power and that would put his empowerment over them at risk. I still think that makes more logical sense so please be advised that these ficlets are not within the canon of the comics.

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,  
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only  
There is shadow under this red rock,  
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),  
And I will show you something different from either  
Your shadow at morning striding behind you  
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;  
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Here is no water but only rock  
Rock and no water and the sandy road  
The road winding above among the mountains  
Which are mountains of rock without water  
If there were water we should stop and drink  
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think  
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand  
If there were only water amongst the rock  
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit  
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit  
There is not even silence in the mountains  
But dry sterile thunder without rain  
There is not even solitude in the mountains  
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl  
From doors of mudcracked houses  
If there were water  
And no rock  
If there were rock  
And also water  
And water  
A spring  
A pool among the rock  
If there were the sound of water only  
Not the cicada  
And dry grass singing  
But sound of water over a rock  
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees  
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop  
But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?  
When I count, there are only you and I together  
But when I look ahead up the white road  
There is always another one walking beside you  
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded  
I do not know whether a man or a woman  
—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air  
Murmur of maternal lamentation  
Who are those hooded hordes swarming  
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth  
Ringed by the flat horizon only  
What is the city over the mountains  
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

\-- T.S Eliot, [The Wasteland](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176735)


	2. Imperator Furiosa

She still thinks about the Green Place. She thinks about it while she heals from their long drive across the deserts and the salts and the mud. From the wound in her side. From the ghost of the touch she can still feel through the shadow of her hair, the way their hands had gripped each other, had held each other close after she had come home after so many long days. 

She closes her eyes then. Remembers the touch of The Valkyrie, and wonders how she is alive when the Valkyrie had died.

There is something wrong with that.

She thinks of the Green Place. She thinks that she should have been there. She knows it’s not her fault, that she didn’t leave but was taken, but still–

She should have been there.

She should have grown up there. 

She should have been there.

Her throat is raw, like it had been from the desert sand, her knees scraped raw, her heart too, and her soul if such things existed. 

She struggles to rise, even though it pains her side. No one stops her. The halls in the high place teem with life–not like she remembered it from before. People cluster together, their heads bent, focusing on solving problems like water and food–how to make sure they became sustainable, to make sure the deep places in the earth did not also dry up as the surface.

Furiosa’s hand itches for a rig to drive. She thought of her war rig, blown to bits as she bled in the back of Jo’s truck, and learned that his name is Max, that that was his name. Her breath passes through her lips like a hot wind. 

She does not know if she misses it. If she wants to drive that or something else.

She looks down at her arm. She will need to build another prosthetic. There will be time enough for that, later, she supposes. When she is stronger. When she is better. When she is not so–

She finds herself in the hanging curtains of greenery that she had only caught glimpses of before. The Dag is there, tending to them. It smells good in here, Furiosa thinks, breathing in the smell of green things–reaching out for them with a hesitant touch of her hands.

They fall through her fingers like water. Their leaves are soft. She brings her hand to her face and smells the green in her skin. Usually, it’s scorching fire and engine grease and smoke lingering there, a reminder of the kind of world they live in. 

Her fingers flutter-whisper against each other as she wipes her hand on her trousers. 

She stares at the growing plant. They remind her of the Green Place. Petulantly, she thinks that the Green Place had been greener, great canopies of green stretching across the sky like living shadows that always Were no matter where the sun shone. 

With slow realization, she processes that The Dag has caught her staring, is gazing at her with her head tilted over her shoulder, her blonde hair curtaining her face. She lifts a strand of green and tucks it behind Furiosa’s ear. “One day,” The Dag promises, “it will bloom. And it will die. And its seeds will bloom again.” 

Furiosa nods but the Green Things are a memory and an accusation and she leaves them behind, looking out towards the windows gazing over the open desert. The horizon is far away. 

Something wet seeps down her side and she puts her hand against the bandages. She’s torn a stitch. Miss Giddy will be upset with her. She will say that she should be in bed, and Furiosa thinks that she should be lots of things. Miss Giddy will say that she needs to rest because she’s done enough, and Furiosa wonders, has she, as she stares over the gold void until her eyes blur.

She closes them, squeezes them shut as she leans against the window, her elbow scraping across its hard metal sills. 

The sun is very bright, and it is the only thing that is.


	3. The Splendid Angharad

Here is the thing about Angharad, she whispers to the baby in her womb, her hands cradling her belly, here is a secret–and she holds her fingers to her lips. She was not always splendid. 

Nor, she thinks, is she splendid now.

It is a name that someone else gave to her. A man who saw her beauty and wanted it for his own and for his sons and who cared nothing for her but how splendid she could be.

She grips the stone edge of her seat and breathes and counts in threes.

It’s a name the women she found herself beside gave to her, when they saw her strength, when they saw her tears, when they saw her. It is a name they said to each other in mockery, at other times, when they were angry with her. A name they gave to her when she said, for the first time, that they were not things. 

That we are not things.

A splendid idea, really, but what did it matter when nobody believed it but them and what if they were wrong?

The cold fear settles in her bones, the familiar dread, the hate, the doubt. Her hands shake as she traces the letters Miss Giddy had wrote for them. She promises that it says what she wants it to say, that their babies will not be warlords.

She makes a promise to the baby in her womb. She promises it over and over. 

Misery seeps through her, makes her heavy and weak, and she sits down, afraid that the words will be washed away again before she’s learned their shapes by heart. 

She knows that she is not splendid for making promises she knows she cannot keep. 

But she can try. 

She hears a heavy tread, and she lifts her head. There is an Imperator, the one that rubs engine grease into her brow. A mask, Angharad thinks. Her mind is clouded. She tries to hide her true thoughts behind a dark curtain that none might see. That Joe might not see. That the War Boys might not see. That none might see.

She wonders what the Imperator grieves.

Their eyes meet by accident, Angharad thinks, but their gazes linger on purpose, and they are drawn together with purpose. The Imperator’s step slows, her head turning. They have never spoken before because the wives are discouraged to speak to others, locked away as they are. They rarely see anyone, and sometimes, she thinks, it’s better that way but then there are moments like these and Angharad wonders, oh how she wonders–

It is a miracle that they see each other now, and suddenly, the hope that Angharad had tried to always tend, to always cup in the palms of her small hands, grows a little brighter. 

The baby feels it too, and kicks so hard and strong that Angharad gasps. 

The Imperator stops for a moment before veering aside to kneel beside her. “Are you alright?” she asks. 

Angharad stares down at her, at her bowed head, shorn of any length of hair. The brand burned into her neck is unhidden, and Angharad feels the burn again, her skin flinching in tiny tremors as she counts in threes and remembers that flash of hope striking through her, like lightning in a storm, and what are their skins but made of dust, of war-torn skies containing the storm within themselves–the screaming rage and the dried up grief and the wind funnels that tears their hearts apart as it takes and takes and destroys?

“No,” she breathes. “I am not alright.”

The Imperator understands for she is not alright herself. It’s there, lingering in her eyes though she tries to hide it beneath the thundercloud of grease. 

But is there anyone who is not alright, because everything is all wrong?

The Imperator stands to leave. They are not supposed to be speaking, and the Imperator knows this. “I understand that you are to leave today,” Angharad says. “Wherever you are going–” and she hesitates only for a moment– “I would love to hear about it.”

The Imperator says nothing. It is difficult to read her face underneath the engine grease. Her mouth is still–she has schooled it well that it might not betray her.

For a moment, Angharad thinks that she has made a mistake. What if this Imperator is not on their side at all–what if she only imagines that she saw a flicker of friendship, of kindness, in her eyes? What if she has risked it all by asking so boldly?

But they are not things, she tells herself again. They are not things to be silenced and tucked away forever until he grows bored of them, until he breaks them, until he searches for more to replace them. 

Angharad remembers the ones that had come before her, the ones that had come before the others. She wanted to hold onto every one because who had killed the world that they were brought to this? 

But she knew that they could be the world again, if only they were given the chance, the moment, the opportunity.

They could bring it back, she knows they could.

All they need is a little help, that’s all. 

“To a Green Place.” The Imperator says the words slowly, as if they come from her reluctantly and from far away. “I was there–a long time ago.” 

It is a sign, a promise, like the one she had made to the baby in her womb, a promise that this was the time, and the time is now. 

Angharad reaches out her hand so that she might hold the Imperator’s in hers. She holds onto it, tightly, fiercely as she raises herself to her feet. “I would very much like to see this Green Place. These stone walls have swallowed me whole and I can no longer bear the sight of them.” Her voice breaks, and beneath her she hears the rev of the engines, the hiss of gas against flame. The engines speak, and Jo’s boys chant back. “Take us with you, please. Please. Please.”

She is not splendid because her voice breaks again, and she wants so badly to escape these walls and these high places and the man, greedy as guzzoline, who has put them there, who keeps them there, who is always, always there, and she counts in threes as her eyes close.

Her skin crawls, and they have told her not to cry because she is ugly when she cries, but she cries now, and she cannot help it. She wipes her tears away with her wrist impatiently and clumsily and sadly.

The Imperator reaches out for her, and pauses. Angharad leans towards her, desperate for her to say that she will help them, desperate for something, and the words don’t come, and the empty places and empty spaces balloon inside of her.

Her hand is poised to either reach out or to pull back. Her eyes are distant and far away. Angharad holds her breath.

“Alright.” The Imperator speaks rapidly, whispering like the winds scuttling through the desert. “Hide in the hold. It’ll be brought around waiting. Descend when everyone is waiting for the water to fall. No one will see you.” 

Angharad nods and then the Imperator is gone, and she is gone as well, for she must tell the others of this splendid moment, of this splendid opportunity, that has fallen at their feet, and that they must take for themselves because they are not things, and there is a Green Place waiting for them.


	4. Toast the Knowing

Toast stands in the desert. She wears a white scarf around her dark hair. Her toes bury in the sands and her hands raise towards the sky.

She breathes deeply and there is water in the air. 

There is life, too. The promise of something better than what they had known. She hopes it will be all that it can be because she is tired of being hard, of scrabbling for survival in the desert and the sand, craving life.

She cannot remember what came before–taken too young, she thinks. She does not think there was a Green Place like there had been for Furiosa. But that’s okay because they can make their own Green Place now, and they can keep it safe (she thinks, she hopes a fool’s hope).

She twines her fingers through each other and stretches, easing the tired, knotted muscles in her back. Then she goes back inside, and she finds Furiosa who has healed (mostly) from the wound in her side that had bled and bled and bled and sits beside her, waiting for her to look up from the fire spitting sparks.

While she waits, she chews on the scar inside her cheek. She knows she shouldn’t, but she can’t help herself sometimes. Can’t stop herself from laughing that dry cracked up laugh when she remembers how she got it. How Jo had told his men to not lay one hand on them but he had laid a hand on her.

He’d always laid a hand on them.

Well, not anymore, haha.

The laughter dries up in her throat and she hugs her knees instead, drawing them up close to her chest as the chill from the desert begins to settle in, and she rocks back and forth, balancing on a rickety stool, bare feet tick-tocking in the empty spaces between the earth and herself. 

“You promised that you would teach me how to use it,” Toast says. She remembers when the chase was hot on their trail. She remembers Furiosa screaming for the gun. She remembers screaming back that it wasn’t loaded yet, that it wasn’t loaded yet, that it wasn’t loaded–sometimes she can’t stop the loop, can’t interrupt the echo with what came next–just her voice, screaming.

She licks her dry lips. She knows that she can’t be like that. Knows that she needs to train her hands into something deft and skilled. She needs to know that it won’t happen again.

Furiosa agreed to teach her, just like she agreed to take them with her. She looks at Furiosa’s face and wonders how long she actually thought about things before just deciding, swerving impulsively towards a new destination with a spray of sand and screeching tires grinding dirt.

Toast is different though. Toast likes thinking about things. Likes knowing what was what. Likes weighing the pros and cons. Once she learns to write, she is going to keep all the lists she keeps in her head on paper so that she can keep them safely sewn into her clothes or burn them or read them over and over until all the crowding thoughts in her head make sense. 

She thinks about all this now as they stare into the fire, and she rocks faster, her cheek tucked into the cupped hollow of her knees, her eyes closing to something half lidded, a blurred vision that does not require her to focus on anything and be reminded of nothing.

The lists in her head are long and they fall to her feet and wrinkle and crease, worn so many times she barely recognizes the words as they tumble and mumble from her lips by rote. Sometimes she forgets how they end and she has to put in something new, and she thinks it might be the same but it might not. Things are different than when she started them, and they will be different again. 

One list goes like this. Learn to write. Learn to read. Learn to shoot. Learn to fight. Learn to ride a motorcycle so that she can scream down the dunes a wave of sand in front of her wheel, arching across the road like the valkyries.

Another goes like this: Find a room for herself. The others are fine, she thinks, maybe even more fine, but she is tired of sharing her walls and her space. She wants to find something that could be all hers. A room of her very own where she can nail to the walls the lists in her head that she has learned to write on paper. The Dag has her plants and her bag of seeds, and Toast wants something like that, something of her very own. Maybe she will learn to mix paints so that she can make pretty things. Maybe she can get the ex War Boys to teach her how they make their ink and how they put it in their skins so that she can put her own things on her own skin.

The brand itches on her neck. She doesn’t think its ever healed properly even though Miss Giddy has assured her it has healed as well as could be expected. But what does Miss Giddy know–she doesn’t, she knows nothing, because she is not Toast. She clenches her fist. She will cover it up with ink, she thinks, with ink she’s mixed herself with a pattern she drew herself.

And there is another list, too, that she keeps in her head. A list of things she doesn’t want to remember, and when she does remember, she puts them down and she pretends it burns and burns and there’s only ashes but the things keep coming back, again and again, and she thinks it might help to write them down for real, to burn them for real, to stamp on their ashes, to spit on their charred remains, and they will be gone for real and for good. 

On this list, she puts down the scar in her mouth. She puts down the pain. She puts down the fear. She burns it and follows the plume of smoke from the fire that she and Furiosa both watch, and she pretends it’s the smoke of her burning things.

The scar presses against her teeth, and she remembers, again, and she squeezes her knees harder. 

“Are we going to do anything today?” she asks because the silence is too much. It makes it too easy to hear the things she doesn’t want to hear (the way she had screamed, the way she had kicked, the way she had pounded the thick glass with her fists). She puts it down on her mind-list and burns it.

Furiosa looks at her and Toast can see the way she’s thinking. She doesn’t want to do it, she can tell, but they are alone with their thoughts, and that could be a very uncomfortable thing indeed.

“It doesn’t have to be guns,” Toast says. She thinks she can load a gun blindfolded now. She thinks she can take it apart too. She thinks she could time herself as she loads a gun and beat her record every time.

But she hasn’t tried, though she should try. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day.

She looks down at her legs. She thinks about the way water slid down them, washing the dust from their getaway, the way it had pooled at her feet. She thinks of colors run through with water. There is a translucent green look the water has falling over the leaves when The Dag waters the green things, and Toast thinks about putting that on her skin so that a Green Place would always be with her, so that it would always be real, so that she could look at something pretty whenever the ugly thoughts reared their ugly head and made her remember ugly things.

“Like what?” Furiosa says after such a long time that Toast has to blink, because she’s almost forgotten what she’s said.

“I don’t know.” She stops her rocking and gets up to pace around the fire. She’s tired of thinking. Of being alone with her thoughts. She kicks at a clumps of sand. “Let’s find a bike to fix. A bike for me.” She’d always wanted something to ride and she’d never been able to have it because what if she got up and went away and never came back? 

The dry laughter cracks through her throat again.

Furiosa rises to her feet. “Okay,” she says. 

“Okay,” Toast says as she leads the way towards the junkyard where they keep the parts they’ve scavenged. “Okay.”

And some day, she believes, it will be.


	5. The Dag

She doesn’t want to, but she asks for help. 

Splendid would disagree. “We agreed,” she would say, “we promised,” but she isn’t here and it is impossible to break a promise to the dead because they don’t care anymore they aren’t here anymore and they will never know because they are dead.

(They should have gone back for her.)

(They shouldn’t have gone back for her–Furiosa and Max had been right)

(They’d all been wrong.)

(It’s easier if she’s gone. Guilt. Self loathing. How could she how could she how could she–)

The Dag looks down at herself. At her belly. One couldn’t know–not just by looking–but she knows. 

She bites her lips. She says to an empty room, “Schlanger.” Her voice is a thin thread, and she hates the sound of it. 

She kneels beside the leather bag of seeds, tending the one buried in the skull. It will grow big and strong and green, she thinks. There is dirt here, too, good dirt. She will save a seed from each pack and it will grow, but she will need more dirt.

Toast is building a bike of her own. Maybe Toast and her can go and look for soil, find a new place for them to take root and grow, one that isn’t surrounded with bad memories. 

She sighs. She goes to the Grandmother of Furiosa’s clan. She asks for help, and the Grandmother asks if she is sure. 

She thought she was sure, but now she’s not so sure, even though she was, absolutely, so very sure a few hours ago. And she hesitates for a moment. The Grandmother reaches for her cheek, and pats her softly with her withered palm. She’s told to sleep on it, and she nods, dumbly, and wonders why she hesitates.

She doesn’t want this baby. She doesn’t want Warlord, Jr. She doesn’t want to carry around the evidence of what has happened to her. She doesn’t want to see his face in her baby. 

Furiosa had talked about the Green Place, but she hadn’t mentioned her clan, she hadn’t mentioned the Mothers. 

The Dag is not a mother. She knows this in her heart, in her mind, and in her bones. She’s seen mothers–real mothers–and she knows she is not one of them. She’s not ready to be one of them–though maybe one day she will be. 

But not today. Not now. Not for this baby. 

Her hands close around a green thing and she remembers to let it go, that it’s not ready to be picked. 

She smooths its wrinkled leaves, and gives it a little extra water. “Sorry,” she whispers, “I’m sorry.”

She lies awake at night. She stares up at the ceiling and remembers. She lets the memories rush through her because once they’re gone she’ll be tired and they will leave her alone for a little while before circling back once more. But sometimes she thinks the circle gets a little larger because it takes a little longer and other days, the bad days, the worse days, the circle is smaller and smaller and she can do nothing but stay in bed and Capable will have to take care of the green things, though she grumbles but she might bring her a cup of water or a wafer of bread and leave it until The Dag is ready to eat, until she feels she can eat.

She sleeps on it, as well as could be expected. She wakes sometimes, her fists curled in the blankets, her heart scudding against her rib cage, because she’s hearing bullets again, afraid she’s going to die oh god she’s going to die it’s going to happen again but she’s just alone in her room and it’s just the engines popping as someone guns them.

She forces her fingers to relax against the covers, smoothing out their wrinkles. She sticks her foot out into the cool air so she can cool down, so she won’t be so hot and scared. 

Everything is different now. There’s nothing to be afraid of except for the part where there were lots of things to be afraid of.

She looks down at herself, at her body, at her stomach and the way it moved up and down in time with her breath.

When the sun rises, she slips through the corridors to where the Grandmother is. I’m sure, she tells her. I’ve decided. The Grandmother accepts her words and nods as she prepares her herbs and the tools of her trade.

The Dag looks out the window. It’s not the decision that Splendid would have made (or encouraged) but then–

Angharad is gone, and she is not Angharad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter deals nonexplicitly with abortion


	6. Cheedo the Fragile

All her life, Cheedo has been told that she needs to be stronger, that she needs to be tougher to survive in this world.

She has been told that life out here is pain, and she has been told that it would never, ever get better because this was it, this was the way of things.

And she had believed, and she had tried so hard to be strong, and she had wondered why it never seemed to be enough, why everything hurt so fucking much.

How tough did she need to be? 

Nobody could tell her because nobody could know. It is impossible to know.

They wouldn’t stop. No matter how tough she became, it would never stop, because the bar would only rise and rise until she died.

In those days, she had been so tired. Even when she slept, she was tired, and she woke tired, and she lived tired, and she survived tired. 

She had tried to be strong when she agreed to run away with the others, with Furiosa when they had known her only as another Imperator. She had wondered if she was the only one who had wanted to ask, what makes you think this one would be any different than anyone else–

but Splendid had seemed to believe and apparently that was enough for the rest–and they still believed even after Splendid had died. Even after they had refused to go back for her, they had still believed in her, in the Green Place, in themselves.

What did it matter if Splendid had gone up under the wheels? They should have gone back for her–they shouldn’t have left her.

Cheedo knows this even though she also knows it to be a lie. True, she had run back, but not for Splendid. She had run out of fear, out of weariness, a wordless scream in the desert formed from the dust of her flesh.

None of the others had gone running back, afraid and tired. None of the others had considered it even for a second. Had that not been proof enough that she was weak?

But she had been afraid, and she didn’t think she could go on with all that fear and all that dread and all that grief–nothing would be enough, even when the others gathered her in their arms, lending her their shoulders, as they brought her back to the fold because she was still, at the end of all things, one of them.

The drums beat pulses through air. She settles deeper into her clothes and looks out across the desert.

She has new clothes now–white, gauzy cloth that drapes all over her. It’s soft to the touch, easily torn. It’s like her, she thinks, almost dizzily as she bends over the folds of cloth in her hand. She has a needle made of bone and she has thread dyed from the blossoms that the Dag had clipped for her. Her hands shake because she is afraid that she will make a mistake, that she will ruin the beautiful cloth she’s spun for herself.

She takes a deep breath and tells herself (again) that it’s okay if she makes a mistake. It’s okay if a stitch is crooked. 

Her hands tremble because she is weak, because she is tired. She hears the bass of the doof wagon in her heart and she cannot sleep some nights. Her throat swells up with tears and she puts aside the cloth and lies down as she waits for the tears to pass.

Once she had been afraid they never would, but then they did, and she has more faith they will pass again in the future until there is no more need to cry. Once she was afraid she would never finish anything and then she finished the garb she wears now, and the others had asked to touch it, to run it through their hands, and they had marveled, and she knew that she would finish this one too, even if, maybe, it would take a little longer than the first one.

She stares up at the stars. She waits. She remembers. She dreams.

And then she smiles because she had been right, all along she had been right. The others had told her that she needed to be strong to survive. And she had known that it didn’t matter how strong she would ever be to stop a man, to stop a thing from hurting. 

Even if she had turned to stone the desert and all its winds and scorching heat would have eaten her all away. 

She’s glad those days are over. She’s glad she no longer has to be brave. She’s glad nobody is telling her to be stronger when she wonders how she will find all that strength when she is only one person and when she is so tired. 

Maybe one day she’ll have to be. Maybe she’ll grow it in her soul like The Dag grows her plants.

But time enough for that. 

She spreads herself under the stars, the wind a wisp of gauzy cloth around her feet. Maybe it’s true what Splendid had said, once so long ago, that they would find their true selves in the Wasteland.

And she knows who she is now–and she isn’t like the others. She isn’t like Furiosa screaming in the desert or Splendid opening the door of a war rig to remind him that she was there too or Toast who was able to have the presence of mind to pick up the gun and reload it despite the noise and the bang and the flash. She knows that she is someone who is only a little brave, and only a little strong, and someone who needs so much and who is oh so clever with a needle and thread, and maybe one of these days, she will pick up one of those flaming guitars and she will pick those strings with her bone needle in the dark and home will sear itself across the night sky like comet fire. She knows that she is a growing thing, who had finally found the right soil, and the right care, and that even now she grows and grows.

Once, she had thought all hope was lost, but she had survived. And now, she lives and thrives and it is enough that she is and breathes.

She fills her lungs with air until her ribs aches, and slowly she releases it. She falls asleep, and does not wake until the sun rises.


	7. Capable

Capable spends her times with the trucks and the cars. Her skin is greased with oil and she returns to her old rooms smelling of guzzoline. Toast and Cheedo loathe the smell and how they complain before Toast retreats to the room of her own that she won’t let anyone in.

Capable likes taking apart the cars. They can’t tear apart the war rigs because there are still enemies out there in the gold void of desert, but they scrap the excess, the ones they don’t need or are too smashed to run right, and scavenge the parts they can use to build something up.

She slides her dirty goggles onto her forehead and sneezes into her elbow. She’s cropped her red hair into short curls so that she can work without them getting into her eyes or getting caught in the turning wheels. She likes being able to feel the wind against her neck and running along her scalp. 

Furiosa’s gone to the Bullet Farm and to Gas Town. She’s been working on strengthening their alliance with their new leaders after the old ones had died following Jo. 

Capable smiles at that. She can’t help it. 

From outside, she hears the chants of we live, we die, we live again, and she cranes her neck to look down. Young boys and girls are playing in some sand, tracing games and picture games that they draw in the dust with sticks or their fingers.

They’re not called War Boys anymore but she thinks the words are a comfort and so sometimes the chant will still clang against the stone walls and the metal of the cars even though there’s no one to sing it too. 

The white chalk they had once dusted against their skin has been put away and they no longer look as fearsome as Jo had once made them, culling them for his wars and finding more sick and ill to fill the ranks of the fallen, promising them food and drink and eternal life if they will only die for him. 

Now, they receive care, and when it’s too late and there’s nothing more they can do, they die surrounded by their loved ones and with a pillow under their heads instead of silver chrome painting their mouths. 

Capable kneels beside the window, and props her chin in her face as she gazes down at them. She doesn’t believe in eternal life. She doesn’t believe that people get to come back from their last breath. 

But Nux did and maybe that’s really the only thing that matters, she thinks, as she scans the multitude of faces below her, wondering if one day she will see some flicker of familiarity in the eyes of a stranger.

She swallows around the way her throat has welled up and thinks back to the first few days after they had come back, how she had gone to the final crash site alone because no one wanted to go there because it wasn’t their territory, their land–but it had been their war rig, it had been their friends and their blood and their grief.

So she had snuck away when it was dark and cold, had parked the small four wheeler she’d borrowed far enough away so they wouldn’t hear the roar of engines, and had walked the rest of the way with a leather bag hauled over her shoulder.

There were still too many rocks blocking the canyon for her to climb, but there was still plenty of rubble to sift through. She found the door splintered into broken fragments. If she put them together like a puzzle she could see the skeletal arm that Furiosa had painted along the side, pointing ever forward, and she put these pieces too in her bag. And she found the curving piece of metal that Splendid had once held onto while her legs, slippery with blood from the bullet, slipped and she fell, and she fell, and–Capable still squeezes her eyes shut at the memory, willing it to go away. 

But she had put that in the bag too. And she found a piece of the floor where she’d found Nux curled up and miserable, and she remembers, she remembers, she remembers, and she looks again at the crowd of faces.

That night, she had taken what she could find and, when she was tired, and she was afraid the rising sun would betray her presence, she had turned back, weary and sad, to the four wheeler and returned to the citadel before any of the others had known she was even gone. She had put the bits of truck with the painted arm in front of Furiosa’s door, but she never knew what Furiosa had done with them. 

The rest, she had made into clothes for herself (a metal bodice she only wore when she was not busy, thick bands circling her upper arms, a necklace of thin wire) and she wears them even now–she thinks she will always wear them, always bearing their mark and the weight of their memory.

She looks one more time at the crowd before sighing and returning to work.


	8. Max

The world is fire and blood and–maybe–something else, something more than just survival. Before the Citadel is completely out of sight, he turns back one last time, his eyes squinting against the blaze of the setting sun. 

He still feels weak from the blood he’s given, and when they stood on Jo’s car together, it felt as if Furiosa and him were holding each other up together so they would not fall. 

He’s glad she made it. Not much makes it in this world, and he’s glad she did. He nods to himself. Yes, he’s glad she did.

He swallows, his eyes fluttering. 

Maybe she had found her redemption, but he–

He ducks his head. He turns back. The desert swallows him whole and he pulls his clothes tighter to keep out the sand and the wind and the cold. 

Even now, he hears the child using the voice of the wind to whisper max, max, max.

He wanders. He wanders roads that have been there for a long time and roads the desert laughs at as it hides them under sifting, shifting dunes as if they had never been. 

Sometimes, he sleeps but he never rests. Fire and heat and memory scorches his dreams and he wakes panting, drenched in sweat, hand curled in a fist even though he is by himself and there is no danger (yet). 

The waiting is the hardest. The constant listening (max, max, max), the constant looking over his shoulder.

The sand falls into his boots and he sits on a rock, shoulders hunched to the sky, to pour it out.

It’s not even his boot, he remembers, even though it is now. 

Sometimes he wants to light a fire, but he can’t risk it. So he sits still in the darkness and he doesn’t think that sleep will come to him, but then a rainless storm bangs with thunder and it’s the noise of Furiosa’s gun storming in his ear and his hearing rings and the cavity of his chest goes still very still as the shot echoes and echoes. 

He shakes it from him just as he sees the dark clouds building up on top of each other as they spill over the horizon, and he scrambles for cover so that he won’t be caught in that out there. 

It’s the abandoned cab of something that might once have been a truck and he wrenches the handle closed and watches the storm shadow him, sand pitting against the window, lightning flashing in the sky.

His breathing hitches up, his heart scuttling somewhere under his skin, and he watches the course of the storm, muscles tensing to run before he remembers there’s nowhere to run because the desert is the desert and it always will be and he is safe (trapped) in the cab until it passes.

Something wet slicks his hand and he jumps back, his body pressed hard against the truck, and glances down at a scrawny pup looking up at him with watery brown eyes. Its nose is split and chapped. Tail limply thumps against the leather seat. Coat should have been a grey-blue but brown from dirt and sand. It licks his hand again with a pale pink tongue.

Max looks at it, and it shuffle-crawls toward him on its belly until it worms its head under his arm and looks up at him once more, eyes slowly blinking. 

“Hm,” he says as he scratches the dog under its chin and he looks once more at the storm and waits for it to pass.

It’s not as bad as the one that Furiosa had driven though, that Nux had dragged him into, he thinks. 

He’s glad about that. 

That had been a terrible storm.

He breaks out of the cab of the truck once it’s passed and the sky is clear again. The sand’s piled up around him, loose and treacherous. It gets all over him–in his nose and his mouth and he’s thirsty he’s so thirsty and he knows he’ll have to find water soon. 

His eyes turn towards the Citadel, but he can’t go back. Not yet. Maybe later, maybe some day, but not yet. 

The dog follows him. He turns back, watching the dog lope after him, but does not tell it to go away. When he finds water, he shares it with the dog, and it licks the water from his fingertips until his hand is dry and sticky with spit. 

He kneels in front of it, and with both hands ruffles its neck. The dog lets him, tongue lolling from its mouth, tail beating the sand at their feet. It’s hard to speak, drudging the words up where they’d buried themselves, but he does it anyway. “What’s your name, huh?” He asks with his head tilted. 

The dog roos a tiny little whine.

Names didn’t matter much, he’d thought once, but then he had told Furiosa his name. 

She had asked before but it hadn’t mattered then. The only thing that had mattered was getting free, was surviving. 

But, lying there, bleeding and grating air and dying, it had been important–very, very important that she know his name. 

My name is Max, he had told her and his hands closed over hers as he grips the dog’s fur, his head bowed against the dog’s. My name is Max, that’s my name. 

And for the first time it mattered what his name was, and it mattered that she knew his name. It matters still, he thinks.

He blinks his eyes, vision shifting into blurs as his breath speeds up and the dog licks his face. 

They wander for a long time. Max looses track of the time, but by the time he sees the citadel shiny on the horizon, the dog is a little bigger and his hair is longer and shaggier, and he thinks it’s been a little more than a year. At least, the days that he remembers, the ones that hadn’t passed by in a gold haze or hunger and thirst driving him to survive, the days that hadn’t been taken by the fire and the blood–

With the dog at his heels, he enters the Citadel. It’s different now. There are more people here. They are hard, but he sees something in their eyes. He thinks it’s hope and he smiles, softly and faintly, he smiles. 

He finds her standing on a ridge of stone, looking out over the desert as the sun sets. Her hair is still short, though it might be a little longer than when he had seen her last. He sees the brand on her neck and something hurts inside and he sees a flash of hot metal until the dog whines and butts into his leg and his hand drops to pat its head. 

She turns then, and she looks at him. They don’t say anything for a long time, and the silence is welcome, and he closes his eyes, breathing deeply to steady the thread of his pulse. The dog goes towards her and she leans down to offer her hand, ruffling its ruff as it thumps its tails and leans against her shins, and she presses a kiss between its ears. 

“Max,” she says because that is his name. 

He nods at her because it has been a long time. They share food and water together and they speak little. He thinks he might stay for a little while, but only for a little while.

“This could be home,” she says once when it is almost time. 

He remembers her screaming in the desert for the Green Place that had once been her home, the place that was gone, destroyed, taken from her. 

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

They look at each other, and he thinks there is something in their eyes and he drops his gaze towards his plate and there is food on there but he’s having trouble determining what it is as he pushes it back and forth. 

He leaves again a few days later. The dog whines at his feet and he pats its head where Furiosa had once kissed it as they look over their shoulders at the Citadel. You’ll always be welcome here, she had said before he left.

I know, he says. I know as the wind whispers his name.


End file.
